Last night I was invited to see the show Passing Strange at the Public Theatre at Astor Place. It's an interesting show - kind of like a rock opera, but more of an extended ballad. The music is provided by a 4 piece band - 2 guys on keyboards/guitar, another on bass, and drums. There's a narrator, two leads, and several backup singers who play multiple roles. It's done in a thrust stage with very minimal staging, but with a huge neon-and-light-bulb backdrop along the back wall, that's mostly used in Act II. The music is kind of eclectic but has a lot of rock, blues, punk, funk, industrial, and some gospelly stuff here and there as well.
The show is basically the story of a middle-class black kid growing up in South Central Los Angeles (race is an important theme in this show; the band is all white, but all the actors are black) and his story of coming of age in LA and then in Amsterdam and Berlin. Production values were excellent, as one would expect. However, I (and my friend) thought that Act I, which describes the boy's time in LA from about age 17 to about 20, and his sojourn in Amsterdam, to be much better - more authentic - than Act II. The blurb on the website says:
From Los Angeles to Amsterdam to Berlin and Back, Passing Strange is the story of a young black bohemian, who abandons his bourgeois roots to journey to Europe searching for ‘the real’. Discovering a world of sex, drugs, rock and roll and art revolutionaries, our rebel-hero explores love, identity and the meaning of home.
That's true as far as it goes. However, we both found that Act II - the Berlin part - didn't seem real to us. As I told my friend, "I couldn't tell if he was being ironic or authentic in Berlin." It was almost as if the character was playing a character in Berlin, and wasn't even attempting to be real himself there, but was simply giving his audience (he became the darling of the industrial set while there) what they wanted.
Some other things didn't work. We felt that the ending lacked a lot of heart and left us both emotionally, well, not cold, but unaffected. And I definitely did not like the bit at the end when the Narrator, who is also the co-producer, book author and composer, gave a story about the final dress rehearsal - it was rather jarring, coming immediately after the end of the show itself, especially given the attempted poignancy of the final scenes. There was no transition from the end of the ballad to the meta-story about the dress rehearsal; the ending just fell rather flat with me. The friend I was with, a huge theatre buff, wasn't too thrilled either, and he had come back a second time to see it just to make sure he hadn't missed anything the first time. As he remarked over a nice supper later, he hadn't.
There are lots of excellent moments, to be sure. There's a great scene in Act I where the Youth is smoking pot with the youth choir director, who is flamboyantly gay (away from the church) and yet is afraid to be open about his own sexuality. I found it a wry comment on homophobia in black churches, whcih I understand to be a real problem - see Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians and Gays in Black Churches, by the Rev. Dr. Horace Griffin of General Theological Seminary. And there are some really wonderful scenes during the Amsterdam sojourn about trust and breaking of trust that for me, were more emotionally laden than the ostensible emotional climax at the end of the show.
Passing Strange is being held over until July 12. The New York Times and the New Yorker have reviewed the show as well.
RFSJ
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